There’s no other way to begin this than with an apology to fellow bloggers VW, CF and RSM. They were right, I was wrong. Here is my public mea-culpa.

In the first few months of last year I happened to be the person who discovered and exposed the identity of the author of the Askthebigot website. A religious and viciously anti-lgbt outfit linked to Grace Church Seattle. Until that point the author and her ideology/religion had been kept anonymous.

In the weeks that followed I was contacted privately by the author, Mrs. Katy Faust, and I made the naive mistake of believing her efforts and intentions for real dialogue were genuine. She purported to be interested in debate rather than promoting anti-lgbt sentiment. Everything I’ve seen unfold in the past few months has proved me wrong.

In the next few days I’m going to publish my original findings from last year, which went offline when I took down the Pink Agendist blog. Then I plan to build on that by showing what they’ve been doing since that time to forward a vile and manipulative agenda designed to oppress and discriminate fellow citizens.

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And that is a very Catholic expiatory opener. Also, not necessary. We all engage in discourse in the hopes of trying to find middle ground. Exactly as you did. It doesn’t always work out. It was worth your while trying to go there.

I’m not sure. I imagined that knowing a gay couple with conventional lives would make an anti-gay person see that the outrageous stereotypes were false. But if all they do is revive those stereotypes, then I was wrong.

Worked for me. Hard for me to watch my young cousin and his then partner (now spouse, hurray!) raising a lovely daughter and a great dog in a suburban house with a mortgage etc… and hold on to any stereotype that homosexuality is a “selfish and violent lifestyle.” The Episcopal Church (U.S.A.) was struggling with the issue. Our former Bishop was one of the most conservative in the nation, and I respected him, so I was struggling too. Our new Bishop is more mainstream, and the church as a whole has just voted to bless gay marriages.

When our diocese, and parish, split I stayed with the mainstream, in large part in response to a comment by my un-religious but benighted husband: “Did the good guys win?” “Depends on who you mean by good guys.” “The Anti-gays.”
That did it for me: I was not going to join a group defined solely by who they hated.
(The opinions expressed by the husband of this house are not those of the management.)

So, here I stand, a Christian, aghast at my co-religionists, confused by the issues swirling around me, unsure of many things, but certain of one thing: Christ’s commandment was “Love one another.” And that is what I will try to do.

There seems to be a level of aggression in certain North American religious groups that’s very alien to us in western Europe. Of course we sometimes get a cranky bishop saying something ridiculous, but in America it seems like some religious people take ridiculousness to a professional level.
As you say, they define themselves by who they hate.
It’s very bad form and in very bad taste.

I think there’s more underlying the extremism seen in various American sects of Christianity. Did you ever hear of “Manifest Destiny” — that part of early American history when white settlers and their new nation believed God put them here to take over everything, at any price, because their God so favored them?

That “Manifest Destiny”, religiously-excused ego-centrism, full of greed coupled to self-rightousness, is now “Dominionism.” The Dominionists even have a plan, searchable under “Seven Mountains.”

In short, God tapped them to take over everything and even to start Armageddon, so they expect to be first into heaven, any day now.

I could go on, but maybe this is enough for starters. It’s pretty scary. I saw evidence of it inside the US military — you know, the one with big bombs and nuclear weapons.

Some people don’t have the same agenda towards honesty that you do. Their ’cause’ must be promoted to the public no matter what and usually honest debate is the last thing they espouse. I’m glad you’re going to do much to expose this group in particular but I sincerely hope you’ll be able to give mention to those other cults, groups or whatever else they describe themselves as that fight under the same banner of hate there, and anywhere else you know. Perhaps it’s time for a little anti-publicity to head their way.
Thank you,
Hugs

I’d wondered what came of all that. I think if you have a literal, inerrant, view of the Bible, which iirc she does, it really won’t matter how many gay couples with conventional lives she knows. It is a core belief to her that being gay is wrong. And one can hardly fan the flames and wave the banner of righteousness and whip up fury(or furry) without using outrageous stereotypes. But, to be certain, it isn’t just the outrageous stereotype she abhors. It is the very act of homosexuality.

That’s awful. Though, in this country, there are a lot of conservatives who live in their ivory towers who never come down to visit the commoners. I’ve seen several articles written about how the legalization of gay marriage(some even going so far as to deny the legitimacy of the term marriage equality), leads down a slippery slope to the legalization of pedophilia and beastiality. There has even been a commenter on another blog who said that affording gay couples children amounted to selling children and the children becoming chattel. She called allowing gay couples to adopt child abuse. It really is sad the levels of anti-lgbt propaganda these people sink to. None of it based in reality. Sure they might site some obscure “study” but they stretch and skew that study to their advantage.

Until these people take of their god-goggles they are going to do every bit of that. Because they view homosexuality as a perversion they believe that a gay person will do any and all perversions. They don’t ever seem to get it through their thick skulls that gay people are normal. They don’t seem to understand that marriage equality only extends to those who have the capacity to enter into covenant relationships nor that gay people abhor child abuse just as much as they do.

It is an honest mistake that I made as well. I too engaged in discussion on that blog because she claimed at the outset to foster civil, rational debate without personal attacks. Apparently her definition of personal attacks is different than most, because she has permitted commenters to liken me to a rapist, a human trafficker dealing in “human blood diamonds”, a child abuser. Her convenient excuse is the volume of commenters and her busy schedule make it impossible to respond to it all, and yet she is quite prompt in chiming in whenever anybody endorses her disingenuous brand of hateful ideology. The truth is that these commenters are her writing colleagues, and she chooses not to moderate them because she secretly agrees with them. Furthermore, she cannot give rebuttal to the civil rational debate she called for because her arguments are (secretly) rooted in her religion beliefs. She would be better off saying she is against gay marriage because the Bible told her so.

There is a great deal that is attractive about Katy Faust. She is intelligent, articulate, passionate about issues, even empathetic to an extent. She is interested in other human beings and has a winsome Christian way of meeting people where they are (Not all Christians do that, of course). She wills our good, but she believes that her tiny cage of rules and definitions of humanity is God’s Will, and the Narrow Way to God.

But, yuck. Her love and the love of those like her, eventually highly conditional, are where internalised self-phobia come from, for the straights as well as LGBT.

Interesting. I forgot to check out the link. I always thought this was the most ridiculous part of her so-called ‘expertise’:
“Though some of them were raised for some period of time by a same-sex couple, it was only after the trauma of their birth parents’ separation.”
I’m glad it’s widely acknowledged.

I would “like” Occasional’s comment, if I could figure out how to “like.” Hopeful is the only way I would want to travel life.

Having read your link, Mr.M, I think that from the totality of their life experience, the “quartet” is actually a good argument FOR gay marriage. If their parents had been able to express their true sexuality from the start, perhaps a traumatic divorce could have been avoided. The children would have grown up into very different people.

Happily, our Supreme Court was more swayed by actual scientific studies that show that children are not harmed by gay parenting.